Month: April 2021

Enlarge / Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) are shown at a 2019 hearing. Both senators harshly criticized big technology companies at the 2021 confirmation hearing for Lina Khan to serve on the Federal Trade Commission. (credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

When President Joe Biden chose Lina Khan for one of the Federal Trade Commission's five seats, it was an ominous sign for the nation's largest technology companies. While still a law student, Khan made her academic career penning "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox," a scholarly 2017 treatise arguing for a tougher approach to regulating the Seattle behemoth.

Prior to law school, Khan worked for Barry Lynn, a scholar who was fired from the centrist New America Foundation over his aggressive criticism of Google, a major New America funder. After law school, Khan worked as the legal director of Lynn's new organization, the Open Markets Institute.

So if we can expect anyone to push the Federal Trade Commission to enforce antitrust laws more aggressively against big technology companies, it would be Khan. The choice of Khan could also signal that the Biden administration more broadly will take a confrontational posture toward Big Tech.

(credit: tanith k)

While the United States debates whether or not to put a price on carbon emissions, Canada is getting into the nitty-gritty of how best to do it. The country's ruling Liberal Party enacted its carbon tax back in 2016 to much controversy. Former Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) leader Andrew Scheer decried the tax and suggested it was a blow to national unity within Canada. A few provinces with conservative governments—notably Ford Nation (Ontario) and oil-rich Alberta—took legal action against the tax, claiming that it wasn't constitutional.

Recently, the Supreme Court of Canada decided that the tax was constitutional.

The CPC—which still retains ties with its provincial counterparts despite having a different name—has now proposed its own carbon-pricing scheme. Its strategy is a different beast from the Liberals' existing policy. This is likely in no small part because the CPC's relationship with the climate has long (but not always) been strained.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

On the day Apple was set to announce a slew of new products at its Spring Loaded event, a leak appeared from an unexpected quarter. The notorious ransomware gang REvil said they had stolen data and schematics from Apple supplier Quanta Computer about unreleased products and that they would sell the data to the highest bidder if they didn’t get a $50 million payment. As proof, they released a cache of documents about upcoming, unreleased MacBook Pros. They've since added iMac schematics to the pile.

The connection to Apple and dramatic timing generated buzz about the attack. But it also reflects the confluence of a number of disturbing trends in ransomware. After years of refining their mass data encryption techniques to lock victims out of their own systems, criminal gangs are increasingly focusing on data theft and extortion as the centerpiece of their attacks—and making eye-popping demands in the process.